Moderation

I'm dealing with this on a need-to basis, and the site has become big enough (660 members at the last count) and active enough that we need to talk moderation. I have had a number of offers from people who were mods at DPReview to come and moderate here. There were many really good moderators on DPReview, who did their unpaid job diligently and with sympathy and discretion, and there were a few that seemed to want to play 'bad cop', without the good cop. That's the people, but I always thought that the whole site's attitude to moderation was wrong headed. They started off without very clear rules and principles, and then made it even worse with the infamous 'be nice' policy. One of the tell-tale signs that it wasn't right was that members weren't allowed to discuss moderation - what would you think about a country that didn't allow discussion of its policing?
Anyway, we do need moderation and we do need effective moderation, but we need moderation that is not high handed and oppressive to the membership. So I started this thread mainly for people to tell us about their experience with DPReview, the good and the bad, and maybe at the end we can condense it down and come up with some basic principles that we can operate to.

I don't think that actions and decisions should be discussed in open forum, that is a violation of members' privacy. I do think members who have a gripe about how they have been treated have a right to discuss it though - that's what happens in open society - you can tell people that the cop beat you up and stole your phone. I witnessed on DPReview moderators who posted on the open forum that they had taken this or that action against a member - that's just plain wrong. And threads discussing broad moderation policy would be pulled - that's also wrong. In a genuine community the members of that community have every right to discuss how they are policed.
As I said, mostly the mods at DPReview were very good - but there were some who weren't. I know of a couple of forums which were really damaged by over zealous mods, and I don't want that to happen here.
Let's make it clear, I am not against moderation at all - we need it, but this is supposed to be a community, and it needs real 'community' moderation.

The problem is that people don't know what is the limit of 'bad behaviour/language is'. It varies from person to person, which is why I want some agreed diagnostic rules. Especially on an international forum, there can be misunderstandings about the level of profanity of various terms, and people make mistakes with the best will in the world. I don't think that summary punishment has ever been very effective as a means of controlling things, unless it's summary capital punishment, which obviously stops the perp doing it again - but I don't think many of us would want to be in a Judge Dredd society where that was the rule.

They used to have it, in the 'Off Topic' forum. It was wild. It had a big problem though - separating the merely unpleasant from the illegal. I'm getting some requests to restore it.

which to my mind is something that should never happen. It tends to happen in contentious issues, where the mod is trying to signal to one side or another the he is with them. Mods shouldn't be taking sides in those kids of dispute. In fact, they shouldn't be trying to stop them, just moderate them if they are becoming abusive. And I can't remember you ever being abusive on DPReview, at least by my own standards of what I'd feel was offensive if someone said it to me.

Absolutely. Moderators should always be giving feedback about the transgression, and they should be following the rules when they do it, that is not being abusive and treating courteously the person they are dealing with. Don't assume malign intent, particularly for someone who is investing a lot of themselves into the forum.

There has to be. People do play games with vexatious appeals, but you can't use that as an excuse for not dealing with the genuine ones. Also, moderators should be extremely wary of extreme sanctions. If someone is a regular forum member and a part of the community, banishing them from their social group forever is an enormous sanction and should really never be done.

I think that the latter tends to go the way of lynching, or tyranny of the majority. That's why most societies have courts rather than leaving it to popular vote who gets hanged or not. It's why attainder, which was a part of the English legal system, is explicitly banned in the US constitution.

I just banned you for going off-topic ;-)

Already have, makes it feel more like DPReview.
The process of getting unbanned is the same, go and talk to a staff member.

My to cents.
Moderation should only have to task.
1. Move the thread to the right category if needed
2. Be helpful with questions and try to contribute knowledge to the subject.

Since here is no twitter or Facebook things should not get overheated to often and every user can help to cool down.
There might happen some cruel or illegal posts sometime, but hopeful so less we can handle it with low effort.

I have seen a lot of social network Stuff.
Some strict moderated and some complete without and everything in between.
Yes some people may go bonkers on some topics and some threads will become unreadable.

But you should not underrate a good community.
Some threads may regulate themselves.
If things get overload we could tighten up later on.
We will see quite easily if things get to messy.
But if the user stop to post new content and looses interest because of being to strict will never will find out.

A part of that I can thing a some features to cool things down if needed.

Bill has made some really good points. Primeshooter has made a subtle amendment to one of them - which is also good.

What we may be able to do is work on a 'moderator user guide' which will be used by moderators - but available to all. And this is a very good start. If I get some time over the next few days, I'd be happy to make a start on that.

Alan

There's a thought by some that we should have a mission statement. That looks to me very like one.

I can vouch for this. You and I had many heated discussions, and you always put your opinions (mostly wrong ;-) ) in a very forthright manner, but you weren't ever rude and often very humorous and entertaining. If everyone agreed there would be no conversations except 'that's a lovely cat photo' repeated ad-nauseam. And that's the kind of conversations you get in an autocracy, where everyone is afraid of the secret police.

As someone who seems to have a high nostril insertion quotient with some people, I can see where he's coming from. The problem is that people react in very different ways. I agree that calling someone naive is not an 'attack', but it is a negative comment, and some people take great offence about it. I think there are a lot of people that are not very self-reflective, and as Drs. Dunning and Kruger discovered we all have problems assessing our level of competence relative to others - and that 'all' is important. So you can not intend something to be taken as an insult, but your interlocutor can take it that way. The question is, for a moderator, how to prevent such a thing blowing up. I think it needs sensitive handling. What it doesn't take is a summary judgment on who is the guilty party and application of a punishment with no warning, feedback or appeal.

I'm guessing this is the bit you tweaked ;-)

My most demanding management role was at the head of a group of 65 people. I had a lot of complaints about a manager one tier down, so I had a word with him. One of the things he said was "I'm someone who likes to have rules to follow and likes to follow the rules." It struck me that the outlook was completely different from mine. I think that rules are a necessary evil. We do need rules, and if they are rules they need to be followed, but I for one always want to know what is the reasoning behind the rules. If there is a good reason for the rule, I follow it willingly, assiduously and wholeheartedly, but if there isn't I follow it only because some sanction would be applied against me if I don't. This fellow's outlook was a bit different. He regarded himself as an acceptor of rules given from elsewhere, and didn't care about the logic or reason - he just wanted to follow the rules. The reason for his unpopularity was that he expected the same approach from everyone else, and further, he worked on his own interpretation of the rules, for rules are rarely so unambiguous that there is only one interpretation.
I suspect that a lot of moderators who really want to be moderators are in the same position - they understand that their responsibility is to enforce the rules, but don't mind much what the rules that they enforce are. The job in the first place is to have a good set of rules, reinforced by a good guide to interpretation. Then there will be more consistent moderation, even if some of the people involved are the same.

On a different note, I know the individual that you are talking about and just note that his attitude has been exemplary in the process of establishing successor sites. He hasn't taken sides, but has actually worked hard to ensure that those trying to do something get the opportunity to discuss it on DPReview. That doesn't apply (at all) to some of his colleagues.

Don, that's not genuine. Let's not libel people, even if we have disagreements with them.

The problem is that not 'thick skinned' tends not to be symmetrical. I know of a lot of posters on DPReview that would dish out some quite nasty invective and then complain about others for much smaller transgressions, usually triggered by their own activities. We need to work to make this a site that makes everyone (so far as possible) feel welcome, and that means somehow catering for all kinds of personality types, and providing protection form the group bullying behaviour that the DPReview moderation systems actually encouraged on some of the worst moderated forums.

Whatever, best to stick to telling the truth. I know that you could argue that this is humorous satire, but still - best not to get into digs at individuals.

Hi, nice to see you here. And yes, of course you can discuss moderation policy here, that's one of the purposes of the thread. I'd not like to have rules be that specific - they would end up pages long. Also, very hard to word to distinguish between fair comment and 'trolling'. I think that there is a balance, you don't want people going around intentionally causing distress, at the same time you don't want the too easily distressed causing havoc by over-reacting to statements which weren't really distressing to a reasonable person. I think that the same goes for CC. Remember the first 'C' stands for 'constructive'. I don't see why a reasonable person would object to constructive criticism. However, if the criticism is clearly not intended to be constructive, then it causes problems. I think they aren't too difficult to distinguish. I'd rather that these issues were dealt with by a constructive process, rather than a disciplinary based one. That might not always be possible, but we should at least try.

I don't 'hate' it, I think that so far as rules go it's hopelessly poorly defined. Imagine if you lived in a country where the only rule was 'be nice' where imprisonment, exile and even capital punishment was summarily dealt out on those deemed not to be 'nice', where not bing 'nice' included criticising the government.

I'm not sure that's the case. This is a form of social media, and it's clear that social media can have significant mental health consequences. For someone to be a member of a social group then to suddenly be excluded and banished can have very severe consequences for them, I would think. I'm not sure all of the moderators ever thought of that.

could someone be so nice and make a short recap of the different opinions,
this maybe helpful to find a pleasing solution.

Meanwhile if someone stumbles about a thread where things are going bonkers,
we might remind them that:

• it is important to stay out of going "ad hominem" (going personally against a poster)
• we will need to agree to disagree here sometimes

This is the case with all discussions. The threads been up long enough now to gather peoples' opinions. What I'll do now is draft a policy based on what people have said, put it up for a short while for comments and amendments and then if it meets acceptance, if not approval, we can adopt it. There's no point trying to make decisions unless there is a hard and fast proposition.